Welcome to the LinuxFocus September/October 2003
issue

Patents in general are a very
bad idea because they promote monopolies and block the scientific and economic progress.
In other words they are good for a few individuals but very bad for the
society as a whole.

So why do we have patents at all? Well, the answer is easy: governments and
patent offices make a lot of money in short run. Of course a lot
more money would be made in the long run without the patents but a few dollars directly
into your pocket seem always more attractive than millions made over many years.

A good example of how a patent free environment can promote business is
the Internet. If TCP/IP was patented then your computer at home would certainly
not be network capable and of course the Internet would not exit.

So far the situation in Europe is that "mathematical methods, methods of doing business and programs for computers are non patentable inventions". This may change.
Software patents are especially bad because they cover ideas. Ideas can be
general and broad. So instead of patenting a specific shape of an air-plane
wing you may patent "any means to fly". You can block complete technologies
and things that you did not even dream of when you wrote the patent.

We must definitely avoid such a situation. Otherwise you might
soon find yourself being prosecuted for publishing texts or
software you wrote yourself. To draw more attention to this problem
web sites are now being closed down by their owners. Join the protest:
http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/index.en.html and close your
web site!

UNIX Basics

The LinuxFocus Tip

You don't need nessus or other scanners to
check all open ports on an ordinary computer without firewall.
It is enough to just run "netstat -a". The output will look
similar to the one below and you can see imediately in the column "Local Address"
which ports are available for connections: